Assurances needed on Kodak landfill

Radioactive waste too dangerous to lack monitoring

A decades-old landfill in Kodak Park houses radioactive waste.

The eyebrow-raising disclosure that Eastman Kodak Co. buried tons of radioactive waste in an Eastman Park landfill is cause for concern, but not alarm. That the company appears to have followed appropriate laws and guidelines in disposing of the toxic waste is reassuring. That there is little government oversight of the now-closed landfill is not.

Company and state officials must work together to create a plan for monitoring the 45-acre site and responding to environmental and public safety concerns should the need arise.

Officials from both Kodak and the state Department of Environmental Conservation maintain the need won't arise. They say the waste - remnants of a chemical once used in lens manufacturing called thorium, and 11 other radioactive isotopes - is safely entombed in glass and buried 10 feet below the surface of Kodak's Weiland Road landfill in Greece.

But as a Democrat and Chroniclewatchdog report found, the existence of the dangerous debris was all but a secret, and plans for maintaining the site and monitoring its contents are all but nonexistent.

That's foolhardy. That such disposal is not permitted under current law shows the inherent danger in the waste at Weiland, which can remain radioactive for millions of years.

Too, Kodak's future is uncertain as it navigates bankruptcy and, while the firm offers assurances of "due-diligence disclosure" should it sell the site, a new owner should be beholden to environmental law rather than contractual agreement.

The federal Environmental Protection Agency can serve in an advisory role, but oversight responsibility rests at the state level.

To that end, the DEC must take a more aggressive stance in determining monitoring guidelines and, should they ever be necessary, remediation plans.

Oversight of such toxic waste can't be left to the dictates of yesterday's laws - not when the waste will remain radioactive for a billion tomorrows.

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Assurances needed on Kodak landfill

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